I submit to the forum a provisional version of the font I'm working on, a sort of Garamond-non-garamond: at the moment only roman, even if italic is quite well advanced.
Allow me an excursus. Italian publishers make extensive use of the Garamond Simoncini, to which we Italians are accustomed and basically fond: Mondadori, Il Mulino, Rizzoli, Feltrinelli and many other publishers adopt something very similar to Adobe Simoncini Garamond Std, which - as it is known - lacks many glyphs (small caps, old style numbers etc.), as well as Bold Italic. We can then discuss the meaning of a Garamond Bold and Bold Italic from a philological point of view. The publisher Einaudi instead uses the original (and original) Garamond that he commissioned to Francesco Simoncini in 1958, a non-commercial and unavailable version.
Now, my intent is (or - perhaps better - would like to be) to produce a "contemporary" Garamond, without the Renaissance traits of Adobe Garamond Premiere Pro or Duffner and Pardo's EB Garamond. This also explains the Greek, which does not use the Grecs du roi (that one of the EB Garamond is absolutely identical to that one of the Premiere), but which was entirely created from scratch. In fact, this font fully supports Greek, both monotonic and polyphonic, as well as Cyrillic, in a "contemporary" key.
I would like to point out that I am neither a graphic nor a font designer, but just an enthusiast who learns, often by trial and error, as I progress with work.
In other threads on this forum the first and most obvious flaws have been highlighted: first of all insufficient under- and overshoot and then other details, which I have tried to modify. As for the height of the caps, it was pointed out to me (by
@JasperdeWaard) that it could have been increased a bit. What holds me back at the moment is the fact that uppercase lowercase (such as | f | or | l |) should slightly outweigh the uppercase when touching the Ascender, but raising the uppercase and correspondingly higher lowercase would result in an excess than the lower case.
I still have a lot of doubts, small further corrections to be made, some lookups to create (for Greek and more), but I would feel more serene and better addressed by the always competent observations of the experts of this forum, whom I thank in advance.
I specify that there is yet no kerning or correction of the positioning of the diacritics, which I will do as soon as the definitive shape of the glyphs is established.
Comments
Just few quick thoughts:
/a/ : seems a bit off, kind of sticks out in the block text, feels like it is a bit bolder than other letters.
Maybe it is because of heavy upper terminal and a too steep arc slope? So it creates the effect of almost closed aperture, which in turn makes it look heavier than other letters.
/v/ : aperture opening seems too small, optically it looks almost like triangle. Maybe pull the serifs more apart to make the opening slightly bigger.
/v/ : the apex is too rounded-off. I personally prefer a pointy end, but if that was the intention to make it rounded-off, maybe at least make it less rounded. Currently it feels a bit "foreign".
/u/ : the bottom serif looks kind of strange, I'd make it more like by /n/'s serif (rotated by 180 degrees).
/A/ and /V/ : seem a bit too narrow.
/e and /p feel too wide.
My eye really gets hung up on the weird treatment of the apex of /A.
/r feels too fiddly at the top, too much contrast in the arm perhaps.
Some spacing issues, e.g. RSB of /c and /r and LSB of /t may be too big.
The whole thing seems light to me; I would explicitly establish your target contexts and point size and make sure the weight is well suited to them.
Agree with the others that this is well balanced and comfortable. Nice work!
Agree with the all the above. A couple of things stood out for me.
CAPS
lowercase
Lining figures
See attached file to see the difference.
And a general tip that might help: working with Bezier curves especially in sensitive areas can be pain in the butt. This appears as major issue especially when working with high quality structure definition, like in fonts aimed at legibility (Garamond, etc.).
So there is a trick - work with the letters in Photoshop using pen tablet
and then create Bezier curves as final step.
This allows much better and easier control, and saves a lot of time and nerves.
Depends though on the font editor you use, if it allows importing bitmap as background in the glyph view, if yes, you can try this approach.
The Greek lowercase is based on 18th and 19th Century styles, so looks to me very strange in the context of the renaissance caps and as a companion to the Latin.
For the Cyrillic, consider Lazurski’s approach to backdating the script to renaissance styles, e.g. the triangular Д and Л may work better.
I have taken on many of the suggestions (too many to mention here individually) and now I'll reflect on other ones (it is true for example that |p| is very "round", but so are |b|, |d| and |q|. It is a characteristic trait of the Simoncini: I'll do some experiments.
@JohnSavard
I have already created, but not included in the specimen, some additional glyphs for Cyrillic (not Russian and archaic Russian) and for Greek (archaic letters). I have to integrate further, but I definitely will.
@MikhailVasilev
I'm using Fontforge on Debian Linux (and on my almost new Mac Book I'm trying to learn how to use Glyphs which I find very good, but which seems to lack some convenient FontForge utility: I need to learn more...) ), so I don't have Photoshop, but Gimp: I haven't used Windows for at least fifteen years. In any case, I understood the general concept: producing an image "by hand" with a graphic program and then importing and reworking it with the font editor. Thanks for the work on |a|.
@JohnHudson
The Bold is a non-reworked version, obtained simply by "fattening" an older version of the Regular. In fact, as I wrote at the beginning, I'm working on Roman and developing Italic. The rest will come calmly as I only take care of the font during not much free time. Loved the joke about the "dipped-in-chocolate look"
As for the Greek, the publisher Einaudi adopts the OdysseaU since its Simoncini does not contain any Greek. I understand that, from a historical-philological point of view, we have here an accumulation of characters that stylistically belong to different eras. So are there any alternatives to adopting the Grecs du roi? The EBGaramond uses that one of the Premiere and, apart from the adaptations to the metrics, its glyphs are exactly those of Slimbach.
The International Phonetic Association alphabet itself does not involve case mapping: all letters are lowercase. However, some of the IPA letters are also included in natural language orthographies—notably in Africa—, and hence have uppercase forms. So providing smallcaps for the latter is helpful.
Given that his stated objective was to make a Garamond without the Renaissance traits of other Garamonds, but which is contemporary instead, I don't think that this advice is consistent with his objectives. The kind of Greek and Cyrillic which you are recommending would not be usable for normal contemporary typography. And I think that usability is more important than historical accuracy for the kind of typeface he is seeking to produce.
You can also look at this thread for native Cyrillic type designer Alexei Vanyashin's review of Cormorant Cyrillic. There's also a bit of misplaced discussion about Cormorant Cyrillic in this thread about Ysabeau Cyrillic, where we address Ilya Ruderman's review of Cormorant Cyrillic. In particular, Ilya considers the Cyrillic styles offered by the different cuts of Cormorant «difficult to navigate», presumably precisely since they don't conform to any historical stage... Instead, our idea was to make the default cut of Cormorant take some hints from the Modern origin of Cyrillic and depart from strict humanism for the sake of conforming to readers' expectations, whereas the Infant cut swings the other way and leans heavily into the humanism, with triangular alternates of /De-cy/ and /El-cy/. The latter presumably looks eye-catching to Cyrillic readers, as does Trajan to Latin readers.
Maybe I didn't get the idea of @JohnHudson right, if the proposal is to take unrelated Cyrillic typeface and put it in the same font file together with this Garamond, then I admit that is unusual solution at least, not what you see often. And there are already Cyrillic examples.
On the other hand, direct copy of Latin graphics and naive construct from Latin strokes may also impede the legibility and overall optical quality, major factors are:
Regarding the /к/ for me the choice is simple, going from e.g. example:
I conclude that the straight stroke version (you can find it in unicode as /latin kra/ U+0138) is simply better legible so I would say just forget about the curly variant and use the straight option.
Regarding the /л/ - I like triangular variant (kind of rotated /v/ but with top half-serif added), it improves legibility and it is totally possible to make it fit in the set stylistically.
So I'd vote for it.